Avalanche launches the Cortina Upgrade, but will things change for AVAX?

The long-awaited Cortina Upgrade has arrived on the Avalanche mainnet, delivering substantial enhancements to the development experience. AVAX jumped 3.67% over the last 24 hours at press time in response to this news. A week-long losing streak that cost the token 19% of its value has come to an end.

What does Cortina bring to the table?

The most major optimisation as part of the Upgrade, according to Avalanche, will be the linearization of the X-Chain. X-Chain, also known as the Exchange Chain, is used on the Avalanche network to transmit and receive payments. Exchanges will find it much easier to handle the X-Chain with the help of linearization.

Second, with the activation of Cortina, fee distribution for validators with multiple delegators will be simplified. According to the graph below, the number of delegators on the network has surged dramatically, with over 84k at press time. Fees will be batched throughout a node’s full validation period and distributed when it is unstacked in the future, rather than being sent as a UTXO for each successful delegation period, making validators’ lives easier. 

The health of the network

The number of transactions on all Avalanche subnets increased by over 46% in the last 10 days, reflecting the network’s growing popularity. The cause for the increase could be the introduction of Evergreen Subnets earlier this month. In addition, the network’s throughput grew significantly. The average number of transactions processed per second (TPS) has risen to 22 from roughly 15 a few days ago.

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